Lacking nothing
It could be said that we face one major problem in life: lack.
That doesn’t mean the only problem we face is a lack of funds or goods. So much that is problematic can be defined in terms of what we don’t seem to have. If we are sick, we lack health. If life is unfair, justice is lacking. Is life lonely? Then we lack companionship.
From a spiritual vantage point, though, these can each be recognized as a seeming absence of something that we can never lack, namely God’s presence in our lives. And every aspect of life that is eminently desirable – health, justice, affection, and so on - is an attribute of God, Spirit. These are timeless spiritual treasures that forever belong to us in our relation to God as His spiritual offspring.
Fear of a lack of needed funds is presently front and center in so many people’s minds. But Spirit counters every claim of lack, including this one, and I learned how in my early days of submitting articles to The Christian Science Monitor’s sister publications. At one point, gaining a concrete, calm confidence in God’s ability to meet my needs reversed a dearth of funds, after which I wrote an article about it.
The experience itself was transformative, yet I learned a deeper lesson during the editing process. I had written the article as though the supply I needed had been absent, and had turned up as a result of my prayer. Instead, the recommended edits conveyed the spiritual truth that the needed supply was present even before I prayed. Prayer had simply brought to light the good that God always provides to everyone.
What a wonderful reorientation of thought to consider! We’re not lack-ers in need of changed conditions or connections in order to have what we need. The meeting of our needs depends on the good God is freely giving each of us at every moment. God is wholly good, and every man, woman, and child – in our spiritual identity as God’s creation – is at all times, “the compound idea of God, including all right ideas,” as Mary Baker Eddy explains in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” (p. 475).
This means we can turn from a belief of lacking anything we or others need and see that we already include the spiritual idea behind the thing that seems insufficient or missing. This opens the way to finding whatever unique expression of that idea meets the human need.
The Science, or truth, of our being as God’s creation is that we always have all that’s needed at any given moment. Whatever we seem to lack, or fear we might lack in the future, is a “right idea” that is forever found in God and that we always include and reflect as God’s image. Our prayers never have to cause or create what we appear to need, whether resources, employment, health, companionship, home, or anything else. Nor can they do so. “Prayer,” Science and Health says, “cannot change the Science of being, but it tends to bring us into harmony with it” (p. 2).
Even the ultimate problem of death itself can be considered a lack of life. It certainly seems that our lives inevitably end. And if our lives actually comprised a mortal body, a material brain, and a personal soul, that would be true. But the Bible not only repeatedly challenges this assumption but upends it through numerous demonstrations and explanations.
Among them is this citation: “The gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23, emphasis added). Jesus understood and exemplified the Life with a capital “L” that is synonymous with God. This Life isn’t present, then absent, but rather exists forever, without beginning or end.
All of Jesus’ healing works evidenced this, but his ultimate demonstration of Christ, the divine idea of God, was the resurrection showing that his – and therefore everyone’s – life is the embodiment of indestructible Spirit, God. This was more than just proof of the unreality of the lack of life called death; it also evidenced the unreality of the lack of good called evil, which claims that all that we have is material and exhaustible rather than spiritual and everlasting.
A hymn says of God,
The King of Love my Shepherd is,
Whose goodness faileth never;
I nothing lack, for I am His
And He is mine forever.
(Henry W. Baker, alt., “Christian Science Hymnal,” No. 330)
Our prayer is to understand that having, not lacking, all that is good is our and everyone’s reality. Prayer also enables us to hold to this understanding when the winds of personal, family, or global events seem to blow us – individually or collectively – off course, until the storm stills and the lie of lack yields to the fullness of God’s blessing.
Since we are God’s and He is ours forever, that includes the present and whatever’s coming down the line. Our Father-Mother God, who is good itself and therefore the source of all good, never withholds needed good from His children, and every individual – all humankind – is and forever will be God’s infinitely loved and divinely provided-for offspring.
